Developments in nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on the scale of 1 nm to 100 nm, have yielded materials and devices with applicability in medicine, electronics, and energy production, to name a few. Conventionally, there have been two approaches to continued developments in nanotechnology: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up approaches arrange nano-components into complex assemblies and have been useful in molecular assembly, atomic force microscopy, and DNA engineering. Top-down approaches create smaller devices by utilizing the influences of larger devices. For example, atomic layer deposition (“ALD”) is a process by which semiconductor elements are built at atomic-layer scales.
To further capitalize on the benefits of nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate, activate, measure, characterize, and quantify nano-objects must be controlled with precision and at high-throughput. The human-like, individual interactions of the conventional bottom-up approaches are not suitably efficient for scaling up to mass production.
However, sufficient control over nano-objects using top-down approaches must include electrodes of similar scale that are also configured to generate forces sufficient to manipulate the nano-objects. Due to the complexities of physics, geometrical factors, and the specificity needed for particular applications, electrode design and processing systems are not straight forward. Therefore, there remains a need to provide specific control in spatially enhancing and/or suppressing interactions between generated fields and nano-objects. Furthermore, it would be beneficial for semiconductor technology to merge with bioelectronics fabrication to develop novel approaches to the manipulation of nano-objects.
In addition, in semiconductor processing, electric field control has been effective in manipulating the motion of ions or other charged particles, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,867,409. Systems employing media or particles that only exhibit dielectrophoretic properties in the presence of electric fields are not well developed. Accordingly, there is a need to better control nano and other small objects in a processing medium during processing structures on substrates.